Gentlemen, I wanted to share the above broadcast on a relatively new technology. The interview is by Glenn Beck of Cody Wilson who has developed a means whereby one can make their own weapon with a 3-D plastic rendering device. The plans can be downloaded and according to him, you simply press “print” on your machine and it renders the actual gun from hard plastic.
I’m a gun enthusiast but not a technician. I have a colleague who was the head of a major gun manufacturer and he told me some years ago he was approached by a gun designer who presented the first plastic gun. They tested it and indeed it fired. Then my colleague had asked the designer to place it in the freezer for a few hours. After about 4 hours he took it out and struck it with a hammer and the weapon cracked and fragmented. Perhaps now they have advanced polymers to withstand more extreme temperatures. I also think there has to be some other components made of metal and some kind of additional know-how is required to get a fully functional weapon. That plus one has to wonder how long a life it would have and no doubt it could not stand up against the life of a classic AK-47, or any other gun made of metal.
So it is more than a matter of simply pushing the “print” button on a 3D printer and out pops a ready combat pistol or rifle. It is worth noting however, that evolving technology is making it easier for the average person to manufacture a weapon. And for a quick, short McCivil war, being able to make a defense mechanism in a pinch is a very convenient thing. Just imagine 50 years from now how much easier it will be to make a gun in the home from scratch, assuming you have all the specs. The issue of patents and intellectual property also came into question with regards to this way of making firearms. This is very much the same issues that the record and movie industries have to deal with.
There other items addressed were the things that the interviewee stated. In the video at 4:50, time-marker Wilson states “We see liberty under threat, we see sovereignty under threat” which was followed by radio silence. For Beck’s sake he could not respond to Wilson’s remark because although there is supposedly the freedom of speech in America, to actually state something that would either advocate violence or suggest supporting the undoing of government would mean the cancellation of his show and an American gulag for him to rot in for a while. Again Beck was very reserved at at 6:31 when Wilson then stated “Process is not the way to preserve liberty.”
In the final analysis it is people that determine the peace of their society. On one hand, lunatics can get a gun and wreak havoc, but on the other hand if the general populous in Hitler Germany had access to weapons I still think the holocaust would have happened, but the average person would have had a much better chance to either escape or fight back. It’s interesting that consumer friendly technologies are becoming a mitigating factor in the gun control issue, as well as changing the theater in society’s struggle between freedom vs. chaos.
Read Next: How I Found Freedom In An Unfree World
But where is the fun of being alone in your shop, lost in a moment of creativity, carefully and lovingly carving an elaborate stock out of fine imported wood?
“lunatics can get a gun and reek havoc”
Instead of condemning the “lunatics” maybe you should think deeper and address the root cause- the single mother who raised them. I see this all the time in the media. There is a focus on badmouthing symptoms (lunatics, mental illness, gun control) and ignoring the root problem (feminism, single mothers) of violence and ghetto-ization
I can’t speak for the author but I do not think he is doing any condemning any “lunatics” he’s just stating that guns can be used for good or bad. That, plus all the authors at ROK are very aware of the war against men via gynocentricity.
Can I assume you are posting your response from prison or an insane asylum? And what prompted you to go on your killing spree?
The worst lunatics already have guns. As in, those that are so scared of big, bald, black guys that they indiscriminately shoot little, old Latina newspaper women, for their heinous participation in the crime of driving a pickup truck.
If that kind of walking shit is carrying pretty much whichever weapon their petty little brains can dream up asking for, those of us a tad higher on the evolutionary ladder surely need some of our own to protect ourselves with.
Nice article. These are exciting and precarious times.
One typo though- it’s wreak havoc, not reek havoc.
The funnier question is, of course,
“How sure are you governments don’t intend to use this technology, since it’s plausibly deniable?”
Governments already have access to fantastic weaponry. As our old friend, the law of diminishing returns, dictate, giving them something new, increases their capacity much less relatively, than giving the same to someone who is armed with nothing more than a pair of pudgy, soft hands.
On the durability question, they make 3D printers that will print in wax. Once you can do that it is super easy to create a precision investment cast receiver (and other high stress parts) with stuff that you can buy in an average home depot. For the magazines you can print in ABS which is equivalent in strength to the average MagPull magazine. Other than that you need some assorted springs which are easy to acquire and a barrel (which is the hardest part to source unless you are willing to live with an un-rifled tube which you can probably drill out of bar stock without too much trouble on the average lathe).
Cheers.
Are you aware of anyone that has gone through this process i full? I.e created 3d print files, printed wax, cast and finished components, and ended up with a genuinely useful firearm. All while documenting the process of doing it with nothing but materials that are in such wide use that they realistically could never be effectively banned?
I have looked around for this, since if it is available, making how to do it widespread knowledge, would be a watershed for recapturing our lost freedoms. But I have as of yet found nothing.
Take a look here:
http://defensedistributed.com/
I’m aware of those guys. They don’t seem to be going down the wax –> cast road.
While most current efforts fall a bit short of genuine usefulness, think of how recently they started. That does bode well for the future.
lol at this “anarchist” getting an education with a state funded school.
HIs parents funded the school. At the point of a gun. Had they had access to enough of those of their own, they would be able to afford giving their son a better education, while paying for it more directly. No taxfeeding middlemen needed.
FYI, there are metal printers on the market that can “print” in aluminum and titanium. Okay, so they require a vacuum chamber and an electron beam that put homebrew versions out of the reach of Maker Faire, but yeah…details, details. Some garage inventor will eventually figure out how to jury-rig a microwave magnetron with a pressure cooker, an Xbox and a sheep razor and *presto”: you’re printing off everything from AR receivers to Grandpaw’s new hip joint.
You’re not that far off from being able to print things with metal as well as plastic.
Since the plastics are a resin that quickly hardens, I’d imagine they’ll be doing amazing things with liquid steel (or a similar substitute) in no time. It’s pretty impressive what hillbillies can come up with when they’re properly motivated.
It’s probably going to be a while before consumer-level 3D printers can print out a plastic or polymer gun that will both stand up to the rigors of use, and be machined well enough to be functionally useable for more than a few shots.
Right now printers in the sub-$1,000 range could easily make all the components for a single-shot weapon, requiring little or no metal. Creating a repeating gun of any kind requires machining parts too small, and too sharply detailed for consumer-level printers. That said, you can print the bulk of a weapon, and hand-mill those parts with very little skill, so long as you have instructions
But, the day will come, and soon, when consumer-level 3d printers are going to be able to print out a gun. And, as others commented, consumer-level metallic printers aren’t going to be far behind. The materials will get better, the precision will get better. It’s not a matter of if, but when.
The ability to print out weapons is going to be a game changer on all sides of the gun-control argument, and likely the focus is going to shift off weapons, and solidly into ammo. Since ammunition requires a chemical explosive to work, that’s going to be the hard part for Joe Average to make. Hard, but not impossible.
With a 3D printer, it’s entirely possible a day will come when people can just print out everything they need to make a gun, make bullets, and have nothing to do but then go out and learn how to make their own gunpowder. That day too is not far off.
in fact, as I think on it, I can probably see a day not to far form now when we get a strange partnership of the anti-gun lobby, and corporations, teaming up to push for legal limits on the quality output of home 3D printers, since both have something to lose when consumers can make their own tools without the need to have a middle man.
A few shots is all that is required to take down one of the regime’s lackeys. After doing which, you have access to a better gun…….
300 million people with unlimited access to a few well placed shots taken at their most opportune time, could rapidly diminish the effectiveness of the oppressors.
Oh, I’m not attempting to comment on if this is a plus or negative. Gun debates are almost completely pointless, anyway. I’m simply noting that this is a game changer for everyone, good and bad. It’s not just guns, though. Cheap, quality 3D printing is going to be a revolution that alters economies in ways we’re only beginning to grasp. That too is going to have up and down sides.
3D printing scares people for more than just that. It’s already all but supplanted to creation of prototypes by traditional means, and it allows FAR more complex shapes to be manufactured than ever before.
The main thing, though, and what this guy didn’t say but did….is that 3D printers truly take the means of production, and therefore regulation, out of ‘official’ hands. The implication is that ‘Rule by Consent’ is more important now than ever….hint hint.
As for making Gunpowder…well, I looked it up…Gunpowder is a mixture of sulfur, charcoal, and potassium nitrate (saltpetre)..hardly difficult to get. Lead is easy to find, and a mold is likely to be easy to find or make….
Yeah, I can see how this would scare the shit out of a lot of people…in all sorts of businesses.
I believe the quest should be on reliable, easy to make at home, smokeless powder and primers. A “printable” lower is a lot less important that it seems. Ask those with restricted acess to ammo…
Jay Leno already has a high end metals printer to replicate parts for his antique and gallon cars collection. Motley Fool does an infomercial selling reports of the top players in the 3D printing industry – bottom line is about 500 Million Chinese and Japanese and Korean manufacturing workers are about to be obsoleted by automated robotic ultra high precision shops building everything you can imagine on just in time custom buy to order in the countries where the demand is – no more consuming $4 a gollon fuel to transport production halfway around the world because PanAsia has people will to work for a fraction of western labor rates. 3D printing will change and revolutionize many industries via creative destruction including:
http://finance.yahoo.com/blogs/daily-ticker/3-d-tech-stocks-going-change-world-josh-164129611.html
Only 3 currently public Companies (Ticker Symbols) – All 3 profitable:
Proto Labs PRLB
3D Systems DDD
Stratasys SSYS
ooops that was antique and classic cars collection
http://scottlocklin.wordpress.com/2012/08/11/bad-engineering-journalism-reporting-on-3-d-printing-of-guns/
That’s a sexy gun in the stock photo. I don’t normally like the black guns but the freefloating barrel and magpull stock look great. Looks like a custom pistol grip too.
I have a steam cannon I made from a piece of stainless steel tubing, a gasoline/alcohol generator, and pressurized natural gas tank on my old property. It’s not working so great now, but when I put it together it had a revolving loader that allowed it to shoot 26 bb’s per second at nearly 400 feet per second. Sure, it was mounted on top of the generator (It had to be, that much pressure would toss you around like a leaf) but even with rounds as small as copperheads you could chew through a foot thick log in seconds.
Of course, I messed it up trying to use it to launch piano wire rods with an eye to making it armor piercing, the velocity is far too low, but property defensive weapons are easy as pie.A laptop, motion sensor, and fish tracker could have made that sucker into an absolutely deadly automated area denial weapon.